This section describes approaches that could be employed, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or employed. Hence, unless explicitly specified otherwise, any approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application, and any approaches described in this section are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Businesses have invested heavily in implementing information technology (IT) infrastructure in the form of private networks (e.g., local area networks or enterprise-wide wide area networks). Such businesses to date have deployed substantial network assets to protect their private networks from external Internet-based attacks, including deploying Demilitarized Zones (DMZ) between the private networks and the Internet, establishing virtual private network (VPN) gateways for secure communication between the private networks and external network devices via the Internet, etc.
Attempts to improve service delivery between businesses have included reliance on proprietary business-to-business (B2B) integration solutions between private networks, relocating an IT infrastructure from a private network into a virtualized (e.g., “cloud”) infrastructure, or software-defined-network (SDN) solutions.